HUMAN-MACHINE CONFIGURATIONS: AI, ROBOTICS AND THE DISINTEGRATION OF HUMAN INTEGRITY

#TalksSun.21 / 14:00 - 15:00

Theater

The advance of research in artificial intelligence (AI) for both software and hardware is today more rapid than ever. Governmental and academic institutions are only beginning to respond to the social and ethical issues posed by increasingly ubiquitous and proactive AIs. Corporations and startups, on the other hand, relentlessly focus on creating AI capable of drastically changing human activities: from everyday routines and law enforcement to medical diagnosis and warfare. Human bodies and identities are continuously categorized, online and offline, by artificially intelligent algorithms. Robotic machines increasingly populate and often actively condition human life. But what if, by contrast, artificial intelligence could be used to contaminate human bodily experience? How does a body defiled by algorithms look like and move? How can autonomous robotics help inhabit hybrid human-machine configurations?

Free entrance with queue precedence

Day entrance tickets for theater events will be distributed at the reception of the venue

Marco Donnarumma (IT)

Artist and scholar.
Born in Naples, Italy, 1984. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

A unique presence across contemporary performance and media arts, Marco Donnarumma distinguishes himself by his use of emerging technology to deliver artworks that are at once intimate and powerful, oneiric and uncompromising, sensual and confrontational. Working with biotechnology, biophysical sensing, as well as artificial intelligence and neurorobotics, Donnarumma expresses the chimerical nature of the body with a new and unsettling intensity. He is renown for his focus on sound, whose physicality and depth he exploits to create experiences of instability, awe, shock and entrainment.

In over a decade of practice, Donnarumma has developed a deeply transdisciplinary expertise, drawing equally from live art, music, biological science, computation and cultural studies. He holds a Ph.D. in performing arts, computing and body theory from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently a Research Fellow at the Berlin University of the Arts, in partnership with the Neurorobotics Research Lab Berlin. His writings on body, music, technology and performance studies are published by MIT Press, Oxford University Press and Springer.

Heading image: Amygdala (2017-present), work in progress for an AI prosthetic sculpture by Marco Donnarumma in collaboration with Neurorobotics Research Laboratory and Ana Rajcevic Studio. Photo courtesy of Dario J Laganà.